Spain: violence and looting on fifth night of
protests over rapper's arrest
Police and demonstrators clashed again in Barcelona
during demonstrations over the jailing of Pablo Hasél
Agencies
Sun 21 Feb
2021 00.56 GMT
Police and
demonstrators in Barcelona clashed for a fifth night on Saturday, with
thousands taking to the streets across Spain to protest against the jailing of
a controversial rapper for glorifying terrorism and insulting royalty in his
music and on Twitter.
Angry
demonstrations first erupted on Tuesday after police detained Pablo Hasél, 32,
and took him to jail to start serving a nine-month sentence in a highly
contentious free speech case.
Since then,
protesters have turned out every night, clashing with police in disturbances
which began in Hasél’s home region of Catalonia, but have since spread to
Madrid and beyond.
Ahead of
the rallies, police were out en masse in an attempt to head off the violence
that has marred earlier protests, with dozens of police vans lining the streets
of Madrid and Barcelona.
Several
thousand demonstrators began gathering around 7pm in Barcelona, and clashes
broke out as they started marching towards police headquarters.
Protesters
hurled bottles, cans and firecrackers at police, who charged at them as smoke
poured into the air from burning barricades, an AFP correspondent said.
Others
smashed their way into shops along Barcelona’s Passeig de Gracia shopping
avenue, looting stores such as Nike, Versace, Tommy Hilfiger, Hugo Boss and
Diesel.
They also
attacked the Barcelona stock exchange building and torched several motorbikes.
The Mossos
d’Esquadra regional police said nine people had been arrested at demonstrations
across Catalonia, six of them in Barcelona. The region’s emergency services
said six people had been injured, two in Barcelona.
In Madrid,
around 400 people gathered under a heavy police presence in the city centre,
chanting and clapping as curious shoppers stopped to watch.
“Free Pablo
Hasél!” they yelled as a helicopter flew overhead and at least 17 police vans
could be seen lined up along Gran Via, Madrid’s busiest shopping street.
Earlier,
several hundred people had gathered in the southern cities of Malaga, Cordoba
and Seville, local media reported, with another 100 protesters gathering in the
northern city of Santander and a similar number in Logrono.
So far,
more than 100 people have been arrested in the protests over Hasél, and scores
more injured in the clashes, among them many police officers and a young woman
who lost an eye after being hit by a foam round fired by police.
The
disorder appears to have stemmed from a fringe group of mainly younger people
who constituted a small number of the thousands who marched to support Hasél
and to oppose the Spanish laws used to prosecute him.
“Defending the freedom of expression doesn’t
justify in any case the destruction of property, frightening our fellow
citizens, and hurting businesses already hurt by the crisis,” she said.
At issue
are more than 60 tweets published between 2014 and 2016 for which Hasél was
given a nine-month prison sentence in 2018 for “glorification of terrorism”.
He was also
fined 25,000 euros ($30,000) for insults, libel and slander for tweets about
the former king Juan Carlos I and for accusing police of torturing and killing
demonstrators and migrants.
On his
Twitter account, the rapper paid homage to armed Spanish groups such Grapo, a
Marxist “anti-fascist resistance” organisation accused of about 1,000 acts of
violence between 1975 and 2003, including 80 murders and attempted murders, and
various kidnappings.
Hasél also
tweeted about members of the now defunct Basque separatist organisation, Eta,
which during four decades of violence killed at least 853 people in a campaign
of car bombings and shootings.
Amnesty
International and Spanish celebrities, such as Javier Bardem and Pedro
Almodóvar, say Hasél’s sentence – and other jailings – are having a chilling
effect on freedom of speech in the country.
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário